The method's foundation

Six studies, and where they were presented

Six independent studies have examined the effects of LEARNIS Mind — the path formerly known as Genio in 21 giorni — on a combined total of more than 3,000 participants. They were coordinated by Professor Emilia Costa, and their results were presented at the congress of AIRIPA, the Italian association for research and intervention in learning psychopathology, which is the scientific body of reference on these subjects in Italy. One of them was published in the journal Professione Pedagogista.

The accounts of the people who took part

Alongside the research sits what participants themselves have said: more than 6,000 documented accounts collected across the network over the years, together with periodic surveys of course participants. The way those accounts are gathered and handled has been examined by Il Salvagente, the Italian consumer magazine, which awarded its certification mark. The mark concerns the transparency of the process, not the content of any single account.

The academic recognition

In 2024 IUL, an Italian online university, granted its scientific patronage by resolution of 25 November, and stated that for the course then called Genio in 21 giorni it recognises up to twelve university credits — six in the psychology sector and six in general and social pedagogy, M-PSI/08 and M-PED/01 — under Italian ministerial decree 509/1999.

One precision worth keeping: those credits count towards later enrolment on one of IUL's own degree courses. The patronage was granted to Genio Net, the company that ran the course and remains the group's legal entity in Italy.

Working alongside public research

The group's scientific work also connects with Italian public research institutions. Since 2022, through Cultura Italiae, with INDIRE — the national institute for educational documentation, innovation and research. And with CNR-IRPI researchers together with the SaperCapire team, from whose work the Fondamentali dell'Apprendimento derive, now part of LEARNIS Mind. Learnis holds a licence to use that material and to train its own trainers on it; the research itself belongs to the people who did it.

What these studies show, and what they do not

These are observational studies on real populations of participants. They describe what was measured in the people who took part. A university endorsement concerns content; a licence from a research institute is an authorisation to use material and to teach it.

The figure most often quoted, and what it actually says

The first of the six studies is the most quoted, and it is usually quoted wrongly. Published in Professione Pedagogista, the journal of the Italian national association of pedagogists, it followed 1,053 participants and re-administered the AMOS battery three, six, nine, twelve and twenty-four months after the course. What the authors write is that all the correlations are highly significant and that improvement was recorded in at least eighty per cent of cases across the areas measured — organisation, processing, self-assessment, study strategies, metacognitive sensitivity, incoherence, anxiety and resilience — and that the effect was still present at one year and at two.

That is a statement about how many people improved, not about how much.